Almost the end of the week

Although this style of furniture isn't what I'd choose to have in our Barcelona house, this dressing table has sneaked into my heart here and I'm now quite fond of it. It's beautifully made, I love the faded mirrors and the fact that I can hang my necklaces on it.

A loooong, busy day today, but a very productive one. Language assignments given back and no tears from those who have to resubmit. That can only be good. End of the working week here tomorrow. We have lesson planning for next week from 9.30 till 12.15 tomorrow morning and trainees will be a bit shocked surprised that we aren't assigning teaching material to individual trainees next week, but they sit down as a group, look at their balance of lessons taught so far and choose their own sections of the book for their last two lessons next week. This isn't as easy as it sounds, as they have to work together, make decisions, and consider the students in their choice of materials, lesson focus, and try to ensure a balance of topic, skills and language practiced. We sit in with them and make sure what they choose is do-able and that it fits in with what they've taught on the course so far as everyone must teach a balance of language and skills lessons. Some trainees go for an easy option and although that's kind of ok for average trainees, we need to ensure that stronger candidates are challenging themselves enough and that their material lends itself to them being able to demonstrate what they still need to do to get a higher grade. Some independence in planning should be evident too at this stage. These sessions can either go well or disastrously badly! By the end of the morning we want a skeleton of work for the week's lessons and for the Sunday and Monday lessons to be well down the planning path! As a rule of thumb it takes trainees on the course about 5 hours to plan a 40 min lesson and that's obviously outside the daily timetable time. Assignment 3 is due on Sunday and assignment 4 on Wednesday. Just one more week to go and they're doing great so far!